Current work update - 11/5/14

I know you didnt mean it like that, but I think I can still remember at least 3 or so, at least in a rough form. Makes me actually remember of how many different things even on that tiny map can happen and how just playing one build again and again actually doesn't work because if you do that people will analyze your play, find a weekness and suddenly throw a few bombs right at those crucial engineers that were supposed to push up your commander gun upgrade.

It's fun just remembering how people playing with the meta on that map, even though winter duel certainly was not the greatest map from a "fight for mapcontrol" standpoint.

Having vastly different maps in a mappool to play is good. That weird 1 mex spot low space map looks actually not bad if it is a handmade map that is perfectly balanced. But I can't imagine playing a map like that without having actually time to prepare. I want to prepare for a game before I play it. I want to be able to actually plan out how I should play, digging through countless possibilities that the map offers, incorporating what I have seen my opponents most likely will do.
That process can easily go on for weeks or even month on a single map, reducing that all to the few seconds before a match starts sounds like giving up on so much of that fun of playing the game without directly playing the game
Also I especially want to be able to redo the game if I screwed up my plan and got outplayed. So I don't want to play the next map before I have not understood how to play the map I just lost on.

Though I can accept that you're subjective feeling of fun differs from my subjective feeling of fun

AI on a gas planet? Blimey! There is nowhere safe now.

YOU CANNOT HIDE ANYTHING, NEVERRR!!!!

Especially not with the forum's "follow" feature

WE ARE WATCHING YOU ALWAYS

Yep, now the AI goes on GGs.

Now it's just another noob playing on the giants.

Whut about annihilazers....where safe from those right? (uh oh...)

It would be Bullseye the Monday Night Combat Mascot to choose the color yellow for his team...

That's the problem, though. The process of learning everything a map has to offer can go on for weeks or even months.........and then it's a dead map offering nothing but routine gameplay and played-out options.

I guess the idea is that this is the point where they can sell us an expansion pack. "25 New Tournament Maps! Only $5.99 on Steam!"

That's the beauty of random generation of maps (at least, from a player perspective). Although you can never go back and try the same map again, you also never wear out your map options, since they may effectively be infinite. I can break out a new game of Civilization and be guaranteed that I get to play a new map instead of just going through the routine of playing a map I've already worn out. (Civilization games do offer fixed maps that are the same every time but I dare say this is not the appeal of the game.)


Although I think part of why you don't like it is just that with PA's balance in its current state, things like "where to place defensive structures" is not an interesting question. I'm sort of assuming that at some point in the near future terrain will matter more, defenses will be worth building and therefore random maps will have more value.

"Where to place defensive structures" is not an interesting option because the maps lack the quality for that. Handmade maps can much more easily offer that.
Also the creativity of map makers that are given a good map editor is big enough to replace maps every few month (or sometimes years, depending on how good the map was). Since uber is about to release a first version with a map editor into pte I doubt there will be "buy maps now" dlcs.

Google found me a first hit with some sc2 maps page that has 909 melee maps available.
http://www.sc2mapster.com/maps/?category=melee
I am sure there are more than that on similar pages. If you assume even only a week of playtime for every map you already have many years worth of maps and in reality for good maps it definitely takes month to play them out. And even then they are still fun to many (most?!) people. Like if you mix together 8 good maps into a pool the diversity between them enhances their longevity.

If you were to go that route, I would have to ask the map team to start churning out maps at the rate of 10-15 per week, and swap out a pool of 20-30 random ones per biweek. MAYBE that would allow for adaptation. I somehow doubt it, though.

All of this. Also how about a build queue list so we can tell how many of each unit, in what order, we have queued up in factories? I know I'm a broken record, but once again SupCom had a better interface for this.

It would. By time you got bored with 1, you would get another. That would be labor intensive, but possible.

Then again, at least some maps will be clone setup maps. You will see an ice map, and desert map, quadranted off and with the same obstacles, making them play similar. You have this with a lot of games with a lot of maps, a lot of maps start to feel identical layout.

Does the AI understand the need to clear out nearby MEXs to allow them to build?

A decent AI on a gas giant would be terrifying to watch